Fact checking Donald Trump’s past week of story telling

President Donald Trump continues working his way past 10,000 untruths since taking office in 2017, and this past week, he truly topped himself in front of an adoring crowd. It’s easy to do that when the only people fact checking you are considered ‘the enemy of the people.’

Trump uttered a dizzying number of false statements in his especially long weekend speech, to an audience that didn’t seem to mind at all. At last count, we had 60 blatantly false statement he made in just over two hours.

He got the unemployment
rate wrong. He misstated his winning margin in the election. He reprised some
of his most frequently told fictions and dusted off old ones, even going back
to the size of his inauguration crowd.

A look at some of his
words in his two-hour-plus speech to the Conservative Political Action
Conference on Saturday:

UNEMPLOYMENT

TRUMP: “We’re down to 3.7 percent unemployment, the lowest number in a long
time.”

THE FACTS: The unemployment rate is 4 percent. It was 3.7 percent in
September.

DIVERSITY VISAS

TRUMP: On the diversity visa lottery program: “They send us the people they
don’t want.”

THE FACTS: A persistent falsehood. “They,” meaning other countries, do
not select citizens for the U.S. program. Foreigners decide on their own to
apply for it. They must meet education or skills benchmarks to apply and those
who are tentatively selected through the lottery must pass background checks
before being confirmed.

Trump attributed similar
characteristics to migrant caravans from Central America, suggesting
governments try to get rid of their bad people by putting them in caravans for
the U.S. Again, migrants are self-selected, not told to march to the U.S.

RUSSIA INVESTIGATION

TRUMP: Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative team has “13 of the
angriest Democrats in the history of our country.”

THE FACTS: Mueller is a longtime Republican and party affiliation cuts
both ways — or no way at all — in the varied background of the team. Some have donated
campaign money to Democrats. The team is not known to be particularly or
historically angry.

CROWD SIZE

TRUMP on what he considers false reporting about his crowd sizes: “They did
the same thing at our big inauguration speech. You take a look at those crowds.
…We had a crowd, I’ve never seen anything like it. … There were people
(from) the Capitol down to the Washington Monument.”

THE FACTS: The National Park Service released dozens of photos of the
crowd gathered for his inauguration ceremony and it was clear from them that
crowds did not extend to the Washington Monument from the Capitol. Large swaths
of empty space were visible on the National Mall.

The park service also
released photos from President Barack Obama’s two inaugurations, showing that
his 2009 event far outstripped the number of people who attended Trump’s
inauguration.

It released the photos in
response to news media requests made through the Freedom of Information Act
after Trump and his aides accused news organizations of framing or timing
photos and video to make it look like not many people came.

JAMES COMEY

TRUMP: “Every single Democrat said Comey should be fired” for his handling of
the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails late in the campaign. Senate
Democratic leader Chuck Schumer “called for his resignation many times.”

THE FACTS: Not true. Democrats did not universally — or even broadly —
call for Comey to be fired despite their anger over his decision to go public
before Election Day with news that the FBI had renewed its investigation of
Clinton’s handling of her emails. Several Democratic lawmakers did want him
out, but they were a distinct minority.

Schumer said he had lost
confidence in Comey but did not urge his removal, telling Bloomberg News he
wanted to speak with the FBI chief “to restore my faith.” The House Democratic
leader, Nancy Pelosi, also held off on asking for Comey to step down, while
musing: “Maybe he’s not in the right job.” Trump fired him months later.

GREEN NEW DEAL

TRUMP: “No planes, no energy. …Perhaps nothing is more extreme than the
Democrats’ plan to completely take over American energy, and completely destroy
America’s economy through their new $100 trillion dollar Green New Deal. …It
would end air travel.”

THE FACTS: He’s ignoring the actual provisions of the plan, which would
not ban air travel or end traditional sources of energy. The plan, backed by
some liberal Democrats but greeted cautiously or opposed by others in the
party, does call for a drastic drop in greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil
fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas.

Trump is extrapolating
from a fact sheet that initially accompanied the plan, then was disavowed and
withdrawn by its sponsors. It proposed building high-speed rail at a scale
“where air travel stops becoming necessary.”

2016 ELECTION

TRUMP, on his Electoral College win: “We didn’t get to 270. We got 306.”

THE FACTS: Trump misstates the Electoral College vote in his 2016
presidential race against Democrat Hillary Clinton. The official count was 304
to 227, according to media outlets tally of the electoral votes in every state.

CHINA-TRADE

TRUMP: “We’ve lost so much money with China — $500 billion a year. And on
trade, it’s such a disaster. It’s $507 billion a year. China — just one
country. We lose with everybody, almost. But China is one country — $507
billion, for many years.”

THE FACTS: He’s off by several hundred billion dollars on the trade deficit with
China . Trump typically ignores one part of a trading
relationship, services, and considers only the other part, goods. Even by that
measure, he’s wrong. On goods alone, the U.S. ran a trade deficit of $382
billion with China last year, not $507 billion. That was up from nearly $376
billion in 2017.

The U.S. is strong on
services and ran a $40 billion surplus with China on that form of trade in
2017. So the actual trade deficit with China that year was $335 billon.

HEALTH CARE

TRUMP: “We have some great private coverage. And we have initiated some
incredible plans, like the new cooperative plan, where you get better insurance
than Obamacare for a fraction of the cost.”

THE FACTS: He’s glossing over the limitations of his administration’s
expanded health care options, which involve both short term and association plans. They
offer lower premiums than comprehensive plans such as those under the
Affordable Care Act but cover less.

Short-term plans don’t
have to take people with medical conditions or provide benefits such as
coverage for maternity, mental health, prescription drugs and substance abuse
treatment. Association health plans do have to accept people with pre-existing
medical conditions, but they don’t have to cover the full menu of 10
“essential” kinds of benefits required by Obamacare.

Gary Claxton of the
nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation says short-term plans may turn out to be
more costly than Trump administration officials suggest. The plans now cover up
to 90 days, but if insurers expand them to offer up to 36 months’ coverage, the
companies will be taking on more risk. “You’ll have to pay more up front
because there’s a longer time during which you could get sick,” he said.

MIDTERM ELECTIONS

TRUMP: “We were given no credit. I can’t go and campaign for all of the people
in the House. There’s too many.”

TRUMP, on his endorsement of Florida candidate for governor, Ron DeSantis: “I
said, ‘Ron, Don’t make me do this, Ron.’ ‘Sir, I can win.’ Alright, Ron, here
we go. Because I know if he loses — which almost never happens when I endorse
someone, almost never. Only one time, that was because it was done in the
middle of the day of the election… But we very rarely lose.”

THE FACTS: Trump is wrong to suggest that almost every candidate he
endorsed and campaigned for in the November midterm elections — except for
perhaps one — won.

Two Republicans whom Trump
strongly backed in their Senate races — Montana’s Matt Rosendale and West
Virginia’s Patrick Morrisey — lost to Democratic Sens. Jon Tester and Joe
Manchin, respectively. Trump had visited Montana four times and West Virginia
three times to rally voters. Trump also campaigned for two other Senate losers:
incumbent Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada and Leah Vukmir in Wisconsin.

In the House, Republican
Rep. Jason Lewis lost his race in Minnesota to Democrat Angie Craig, whom he
had defeated by 2 percentage points in 2016. Trump endorsed Lewis and
campaigned for him.

VETERANS

TRUMP, on the Choice program for veterans: “I got that approved after 44 years
of being unable to get it approved for our veterans.”

THE FACTS: False. Congress approved the private-sector Veterans Choice
health program in 2014 and President Barack Obama signed it into law. Trump is expanding
it.

TRUMP: “We are taking care of our veterans like they have never been taken care
of before. We just got them Choice so they can now go see a doctor. Now they
can go see a doctor instead of waiting on line for weeks and weeks and weeks.”

THE FACTS: Veterans still must wait for weeks.

While it’s true the VA
recently announced plans to expand eligibility for veterans in the Veterans
Choice program, it remains limited due in part to uncertain money and longer
waits.

The program currently
allows veterans to see doctors outside the VA system if they must wait more
than 30 days for an appointment or drive more than 40 miles to a VA facility.
Under new rules to take effect in June, veterans will have that option for a
private doctor if their VA wait is only 20 days (28 for specialty care) or
their drive is only 30 minutes.

But the expanded Choice
eligibility may do little to provide immediate help.

That’s because veterans
often must wait even longer for an appointment in the private sector. Last
year, then-Secretary David Shulkin said VA care is “often 40 percent better in
terms of wait times” compared with the private sector. In 2018, 34 percent of
all VA appointments were with outside physicians, down from 36 percent in 2017.

Choice came into effect
after some veterans died while waiting months for appointments at the Phoenix
VA medical center.

SHUTDOWN

TRUMP: “I flew to Iraq — the first time I left the White House, because I
stayed at the White House for months and months because I wanted the Democrats
to get back from their vacations from Hawaii and these other places.”

THE FACTS: Trump actually left the White House plenty of times during
the “months and months” surrounding the partial government shutdown that began
Dec. 22.

Besides his trip to Iraq
and Germany on Dec. 26-27, Trump traveled to the Mexican border town of
McAllen, Texas, on Jan. 10. On Jan. 14, he also went to New Orleans to address
the American Farm Bureau. He’s left the White House during the five-week shutdown
for meetings at Camp David and the Capitol.

Shortly before the
shutdown began, he traveled to Philadelphia to watch the Army-Navy football
game (Dec. 8), visited Kansas City for a law enforcement conference (Dec. 7),
attended former President George H.W. Bush’s funeral at the Washington National
Cathedral (Dec. 5), participated in the G-20 summit in Argentina in late
November; and hosted “Make America Great Again” rallies in Mississippi with
Senate candidate Cindy Hyde-Smith (Nov. 26). He hosted a dinner on Thanksgiving
at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.